The Outcasts (23 page)

Goray said, “Our engineers have inspected the bridge, jumped up and down, kicked the railings, and so forth. They were very pleased. They have asked if I could arrange a dinner and if you would care to lecture.”

“Sorry. Philips will do it, and do it well. I'm leaving Sunday.”

“So soon? So soon? I did not know. You will miss the ceremonies. But you will be back.”

“Of course,” he lied politely.

“Then I must buy you a drink.” Goray snapped his fingers.

“Coffee, please. What happened to the people across the bridge?”

“We rounded them up and moved them. In the end they will be happier. We gave them the large army tents, with wooden floors, and they have a stream. Or so I hear. A schoolteacher has been assigned to them.”

“Oh,” Morrison said. “And have you found the border?”

“We are mapping now.”

“Since the beginning of time,” Morrison said, “that border has not existed. Why should it exist now?”

“Well, we never existed either,” Goray said merrily. “And now we do, and we must know who we are, and what we have.”

“Of course.”

“I wish it would rain,” Goray said.

Morrison asked Gordon to help him pack, which was unnecessary, and when the packing was finished he gave Gordon twenty dollars American and they were good friends again. Still a tourist, he thought. Amid all this—splendor and rot, whores and generals, monkeys and jaguars, birth death and fornication—I am the same pulpy blind slug with a white underbelly and traveler's checks. There was a brief shower that night, but his room was air-conditioned, and he scarcely noticed.

He went alone to the airport—Philips was to meet him there—with his one bag, and was silent in the car. He remembered that he had not bought souvenirs. But he had Ramesh's fan. He saw once more the Indian homes and the red and white flags, the drainage ditches, the burnt-out black clearings, the bicyclists and the old men nodding on carts. It was all vivid and earthy in the steamy air of noon. One cart was hitched to three donkeys side by side. Approaching the molasses factory, Morrison took a deep breath, to hold as long as he could, but then he released it and took in more, and the stench with it that he would not forget. Perhaps in the end he would remember only that. His gorge rose but he swallowed it down, and survived. The sun broke through lowering clouds, and all that he saw was suddenly bright and sharp. His arms against his white shirt were a deep brown. That would not last. Carrion crows fell from the sky and swooped away. They were only vultures. Far off the jungle was thick and green, and beneath the green there would be shade and running streams. Men and women lazed outside the taverns.

Morrison sat limp and moist. He ceased noticing things and people, and let the heat and the colors surround him and invade him. He thought of nothing, and moved through the landscape like a part of it, barely alive.

The car stopped before an unpainted wooden shack.

“Please,” the driver said. “This is my sister. I have a parcel.”

Morrison nodded, and the man left the car. Outside the shack chickens pecked and strutted, keeping to the shade of the glossy green shrubs. Under one shrub lay a goat, on his back, legs in the air. Morrison could not recall another supine goat. Perhaps it was dead.

Soon they were in the crisscross of roads that announced the airport, and Morrison was melancholy. At the shed he tipped the driver and allowed a porter to take his bag. The airport was flat and endless beneath the dull sky. Morrison presented his ticket. The formalities were brief. He joined several local men on a long wooden bench, out on the veranda where they could see the aircraft come and go. The men rose immediately in servility and distaste, but Morrison said, “Oh sit down. Too hot to move,” and they did sit, after a moment of indecision. There was no sign of Philips. The only aircraft in sight was an ancient transport, homely and alone at the far edge of the field, but Morrison heard a stuttering drone and sure enough, there it was, his own, gleaming silver, settling gently a mile from him. Now I would like a drink, he thought, as the aircraft droned closer. A drop of rain spattered to the tarmac before him, and then another; then more, and more, until in seconds the ancient transport was masked. “Ah,” said one of the men, and they all said, “Ah.” The rain was arrogant, implacable; undulating sheets of water seethed and billowed with a hollow rattle. “This the real thing,” one man said. Morrison wondered if he would leave today after all.

Then the rain ceased, abruptly, and left the field clean and steaming under a mother-of-pearl sky. His aircraft approached, and stood monstrous and gleaming.

“Hello,” Philips said. Morrison turned. There were silvery beads of rain on Philips's hair, and his red shirt was damp. Ramesh and Tall Boy stood behind him.

“Hello,” Morrison said. “Just in time.”

“Good,” Philips said. Men in orange slickers rushed out with a gangway. A man without a slicker stood in a puddle bearing furled umbrellas. He squinted up at the sky and returned to the shed.

“Take a seat,” Morrison said. The local men were still on the bench, but Philips made shooing motions and clucking sounds, and they lazed away cheerfully.

The four of them sat down and stared out at the pearly sky and the paunchy black clouds. Morrison had nothing much to say. They were good men and so was he in his way, and this farewell at the airport was only more foolishness.

“Why don't we just say good-bye now?” he said. “You can get on back.”

“Plenty of time,” Philips said.

Ramesh cleared his throat and smiled quickly. “Will you be coming back here?”

“No.”

“There is a lot to do,” Philips said.

“I know.”

“A dam. And bridges, and housing, and more roads.”

“Good luck,” Morrison said. “My sincere good wishes.”

Philips's lips were tight. “All right,” he said.

They watched passengers descend. The stewardess smiled and smiled.

“Well, I brought you this here,” Tall Boy said. It was a plain index card, unlined. On one side was written, in a clear sloping hand,
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ,
and on the other,
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Yours Truly Tall Boy With Thanks
.

It was a relief to smile. Tall Boy also smiled, and saluted off his temple with one unmilitary finger. “I'll keep this,” Morrison said. “So I wasn't altogether wasted.”

“Oh, stop it,” Philips said. “There is so much you could do here.”

“Not me,” Morrison said. “There's nothing for me to do here.”

“You are sulking,” Philips said.

“No,” Morrison said. “You don't need me.”

“This is a mistake,” Philips said. “You are running away from something when you ought to be fighting it.”

“I can't fight myself,” Morrison said.

“What will you do?”

“Go back to my job. Build a shopping center. We'll condemn some Indian land and use only the best redwood. After a while you'll drop a bomb on us and it won't matter.”

“Nobody wants to drop bombs,” Philips muttered.

“In fifty years we'll only be in the way,” Morrison explained modestly.

“Oh hell,” Philips said. “There is no talking to you.”

“The job was the best I can remember,” Ramesh said. “It was a pleasure working with a man we could like.”

“You a fine fellow,” Tall Boy said, and clapped him on the shoulder with a hand like a hammer.

Philips said nothing, but looked steadily at Morrison. Then he said, “I have almost no friends. There is no one who uses my first name.”

“Problems,” Morrison said. “Everybody has problems.” Rage played about them both, and Morrison ached. Damn him!

“I have no house and no village,” Philips said. “I have read Locke and Marx and I live in a stew of corrupt politicians. I am a slave to goatish lusts. All you can do is grow up. Accept it all and go on building. There is a world to build.” He turned away then, as if it had taken him thirty years to learn that and he had only that to say. Yet he started to speak again; and fell silent.

“Count me out,” Morrison said, his chest tight. “You got your bridge. I'm going home.”

“Not with a bang but a whimper,” Philips said.

“That's it.”

“All right,” Philips said briskly. He rose. “Good-bye. Good luck.”

“Good-bye. Good luck.” They shook hands, and then Morrison shook hands with Ramesh and Tall Boy, and they all stood there awkwardly for a while like visitors in a hospital.

“Hell,” Philips said. “Nobody hurt your niggers.”

“That's right,” Morrison said. “Nobody hurt my niggers.”

Then they went away. They went through the doorway of the shed and were lost in the crowd.

Soon a natty official came onto the veranda to announce Morrison's flight. A fresh fall of rain had begun to spatter the tarmac, and by the time Morrison reached the hole in the side of the aircraft, his hair and shoulders were wet, his face streaming. He took a window seat, starboard, and watched the rain swell and thicken until the wall of distant jungle was lost to sight. Lines of froth raced across the runway like combers. A man in an orange slicker dashed beneath the wing. Morrison was not nervous. Nothing could happen to you if you did not exist. He was not sure who he was, or what, so nothing could happen to him. In time he might make discoveries. Even a new start. Perhaps a new start was possible. Perhaps he could find his own borders and clear them and map them. A man was not nothing until he was dead. Morrison was not dead. That much he could say for himself. In time his eyes would uncross, and he would grasp his own toes and gurgle, and his smile would mean more than gas.

His arms were solid and very brown against his white shirt. His arms were his vanity. He examined the hairs. They had been reddish when he was pale but now they were golden.

Soon the engines whined, and he fastened his belt, and the aircraft lumbered forward. At the head of the runway they turned, and for a moment he could see the wooden shed with the wet flag hanging limp, and then the rain washed it out, great silver sheets of rain, and they had to wait twenty minutes. That was no bother to Morrison except for the man beside him. The man was a compatriot, beefy, with a large jaw and a small, thoroughly veined nose, and a tendency to talk. A Pittsburgher, he said. To a silent Morrison he went on about one thing and another while they waited; chiefly what a filthy and primitive country this was, and what filthy and primitive people lived in it. When the rain diminished and they lunged into that terrific first surge, he announced his name and held forth a chummy hand. Morrison smiled like Bawi because he felt rotten, very rotten, exceptionally rotten just then, and a first step was necessary, some first step, you see, so he grinned that broad toothy grin and rolled his eyes dementedly and boomed, “Yis sor! Vairy fuckin hallo!” and he completed his long voyage in a decent and honorable solitude.

About the Author

Stephen Becker (1927–1999) was an American author, translator, and teacher whose published works include eleven novels and the English translations of Elie Wiesel's
The Town Behind the Wall
and André Malraux's
The Conquerors
. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and after serving in World War II, he graduated from Harvard University and studied in Peking and Paris, where he was friends with the novelist Richard Wright and learned French in part by reading detective novels. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Becker taught at numerous schools throughout the United States, including the University of Iowa, Bennington College, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His best-known works include
A Covenant with Death
(1965), which was adapted into a Warner Brothers film starring Gene Hackman and George Maharis;
When the War Is Over
(1969), a Civil War novel based on the true story of a teenage Confederate soldier executed more than a month after Lee's surrender; and the Far East trilogy of literary adventure novels:
The Chinese Bandit
(1975),
The Last Mandarin
(1979), and
The Blue-Eyed Shan
(1982).

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1967 by Stephen Becker

Cover design by Kat JK Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2690-1

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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